Strange Spike in Direct / None traffic
-
Over the past week or so, my client's Australian personal training website has experienced a dramatic spike in Google Analytics sessions (see attached screenshot). All the visits are coming from various states in the US and via the "Direct / None" source.
All the visits are less than 1 second in duration so I'm assuming it's coming from some sort of automated bots.
I'm worried for a couple of reasons:
A) Could somebody be deliberately spamming the site to adversely affect our rankings?
B) How do I get rid of this traffic from our analytics reports?
-
Dave, did you figure out what was causing the spike?
-
Agreed on looking in at the city/network. I've seen this before, and the cause was a website monitoring service we signed up for that was actually triggering javascript.
-
I've seen something similar to this many times. It's not terribly likely that it will adversely affect your rankings. Though someone may be trying to test your site security.
You could possibly better zero in on the source by using a combination of city/network domain as a secondary dimension to the direct medium.
If you have multiple profiles, you could setup a filter based on what the secondary dimension insights yield - should the traffic continue.
However, a less permanent solution would be a custom report with an exclude for direct traffic from a certain city/region.
Edit: Second thought, if the traffic doesn't stop and starts negatively affecting site performance - you may be able to find the offending IP and block them.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Rogerbot directives in robots.txt
I feel like I spend a lot of time setting false positives in my reports to ignore. Can I prevent Rogerbot from crawling pages I don't care about with robots.txt directives? For example., I have some page types with meta noindex and it reports these to me. Theoretically, I can block Rogerbot from these with a robots,txt directive and not have to deal with false positives.
Reporting & Analytics | | awilliams_kingston0 -
Bounce Rates: Leaving my domain.com/blog to shop on mydomain.com counts as bounce rate?
Hello! I have a kind of difficult question. On my main domain i have: Store: mydomain.com and wordpress blog on mydomain.com/blog If I have a link to a specific product on my blog and user goes to the product on the store, will bounce rate increase or as it's the same domain will be like a new page view? Different CMS's and blog is on a different analytics account than the store. I hope i could explain myself! Thank you
Reporting & Analytics | | prozis0 -
Bing Referral Traffic
We do not get referral traffic from Google, only organic. Why do we get both organic and referral traffic from Bing?
Reporting & Analytics | | Mike.Bean0 -
Drop in google.com / referral trafic
Hi, On one of our sites (after the release of a new version, including redirections), we've seen a drop in referral trafic from google.fr (france). I know that this trafic usually comes from Google Images but it doesnt seem to be the case this time. The referal path is "/" and not "imgres" as it usually is when it comes from google images. The search trafic hasnt dropped tough... The site is a job listing site. We also saw a drop from indeed.com, I guess their crawler got lost in our new site... Any idea on the possible google site it could come from? Thank you,
Reporting & Analytics | | AdrienLargus0 -
Google Analytics shows most referrers as "Direct" -- What are some better tools?
Very often Google Analytics will show 50-90% of our referrers as (direct) which is not very helpful. Are there other tools out there that will provide a clearer breakdown of what other websites are sending us our traffic? Specifically, I want to be able to be able to tell who are the top traffic referrers to my top performing pages on my site for the last 30 days. (I want to be able to study this on a per-page basis.) Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Brand_Psychic0 -
Direct traffic decline
I've noticed a few of our sites (tour, hotel, and local attraction) which are very established and reasonably high brand recognition that have experienced a significant decrease in branded traffic (-20-30% compared to same period from the previous year) the past few months. There have been no changes in offline marketing though we are seeing a slight decrease in visitor arrivals (-5%) and higher hotel room rates. Is there a chance that Google's not set may be affecting direct traffic numbers? Any other thoughts on how we can figure out why brand traffic is dipping? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | SoulSurfer80 -
Which Algorithm Change Hurt the Site? A causation/correlation issue
The attached graph is from google analytics, a correlation of about 14 months of Organic Google visits with algo changes, data from moz naturally 🙂 Is there any way to tell from this which will have affected the site? for example #1 or #2 seems to be responsible for the first dip, but #4 seems to fix it and it broke around 6, or is the rise between 4 and 7 an anomaly and actually 1 or 2 caused a slip from when it was released all the way to when 7 was released. Sorry if the graph is a little cloak and dagger, that is partly because we don't have permissions to reveal much about the identity, and partly because we were trying to do a kind of double blind, separating the data from our biases 🙂 We can say though the different between the level at the start and end of the graph is at least 10,000 visits per day JarMzoK.png
Reporting & Analytics | | Fammy0 -
Can you use Google tag manager to manage rich snippets/schema mark up?
Hi,Does anyone know if you can use the new Google tag manager to manage rich snippets? I've seen that there is an HTML section where you can edit HTML that isn't shown on the site - do you think this field could be used to add schema data?Thanks,Karen
Reporting & Analytics | | Digirank0